Eighteenth-century Britain saw an unprecedented flood of writing on aesthetic topics: beauty, sublimity, taste, genius, painting, landscape gardening, and scenic tourism. This discussion ranged from the neoclassicism of Sir Joshua Reynolds to the discourse of disinterested contemplation, beginning with Shaftesbury, and the aesthetics of the picturesque as expounded by Gilpin, Price, and Knight. But these apparently disparate aesthetic discourses share a distinctive manner of constructing their respective subject positions. The discourse of disinterestedness most obviously constructs the aesthetic subject through a process of exclusion: disinterested contemplation, or the aesthetic attitude, is a special mode of attention defined as excluding any practical stake in the existence of the object. (Kant's exclusion of vested interest from the judgment of taste is perhaps the best known version of this concept, though its emergence has been traced to early eighteenth-century British writers.) Both Reynolds's Discourses on Art and treatises on the picturesque employ similar exclusions in their efforts to mold the subject of aesthetic reception.

What was excluded or abstracted out or we might even say purged was a wide range of concrete affiliations to particular people, places, and things. For Reynolds, the detail – the representation in painting of concrete material particularity – became a symbolic threat to order in both the individual mind and the political state. Good painting used the abstractions of form to promote social and political hierarchy.